*ISLAMABAD – Recent research study has revealed that US drone strikes inAfghanistan led to increase terrorism incidences in Pakistan.*
*Drone strikes have a bigger impact on Taliban and Al Qaeda violence inPakistan than in Afghanistan, researchers have found when looking at datafrom 2007 to 2011.*
An attack by the Taliban in Pakistan is 9% more likely to occur 5 daysafter a drone strike and 7.4% more likely to occur 6 days after a dronestrike.
“We also find that Taliban violence in Pakistan is negatively associatedwith Taliban violence in Afghanistan,” they said, “[as] 0.02 fewerterrorist attacks occur 16 days after one terrorist attack in Afghanistan.”
Their findings were published in a research paper titled, ‘Are DroneStrikes Effective in Afghanistan and Pakistan? On the Dynamics of Violencebetween the United States and the Talibanlink’. The paper isby David A Jaeger and Zahra Siddique and was published in CESifo EconomicStudies, in December 2018.
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America’s policy has been to use drones as the main weapon to fight theTaliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is how they carriedout targeted killings of terrorists in both countries. This strategy wasconsidered successful so America started using this tactic globally.
The CIA and its military greatly increased the use of drones around theworld. Drone strikes have killed important Taliban leaders but their usehas been unpopular in Pakistan because civilian casualties have beenassociated with them. People also think that drone strikes have caused theTaliban to retaliate against the general public. Baitullah Mehsud had said,for example, that they had attacked the Lahore police academy in 2009 asrevenge for drone strikes.
Jaeger and Siddique examined the impact of successful and unsuccessfuldrone strikes (which did or did not succeed in targeted killing of amilitant leader) on terrorist attacks by the Taliban. They found “strongeffects of unsuccessful drone strikes on Taliban violence in Pakistan,suggesting important vengeance and deterrent effects”.
